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(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

Next summer, the Netscape IPO marks its 20 anniversary, and for many yields the shocking idea that the commercial Internet is now two decades old. It is not new, it is not shiny, it is no longer the next big thing. It is, rather, the infrastructure - or if you want to go large, the environment for everything digital that is created or shared. It is the ground we walk on every day.

For those of us who work in the social sector and study voluntary structures, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship or the broader (and less well defined) act of citizens seeking change in society, the idea of a mature "digital commons" holds a great appeal. For one thing, we've learned plenty along the way. Yes, cybergeek - as they were once known - the institutions of democracy (aka government) will indeed regulate your commerce. Yes, netizen - as they were once called - you can organize large-scale movements using digital networks but there are limits to their effectiveness. Yes, web surfer - as they were once labelled - people will give their money away online … and your secrets as well.

The Internet, as they said in 90s, has disintermediated almost everything it has touched, from certain forms of commerce to the capital markets themselves. And in the that social sector it has clearly served as a catalyst for other changes that have roiled the once-placid philanthropic pond - changes related to the easy transfer of data, to political ideology, to the limits and opportunities of markets, and to demographics.

A series of white papers published in September by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society attempts to sift the hype from the useful directional indicators, and open a broad conversation on where the fault lines may lie and how the sector should plan for its own future. I'm finding these papers to be incredibly useful is helping to guide some of my own thinking - like virtual bumpers on the bowling alley for a raucous child's party, they're shading out some of the constant firehouse of data that overpowers analysis. Written by Lucy Bernholz (whose work and good cheer I know very well), Chiara Cordelli and Rob Reich, they begin "with a clear sense that the boundaries between government, business, and the nonprofit sector are shifting dramatically."

They are. Yet, I'd also leap to insert a caveat here for the nonprofit sector. The biggest trend that I've seen over the past two decades isn't necessarily the change brought by digital networks as the shift embraced by government: the pulling away of social services from public coffers to private has placed an ever-greater burden on nonprofit organizations to take up the slack in the wealthiest major economy on earth. Coupled with the sharp increase in nonprofit organizations, foundations, and related causes, the landscape for raising capital to do good work has grown more competitive every year - while the pot of philanthropic capital has remained level, at best. That funding stress driven by those forces constitutes (at least to me) the greatest pull on the sector.

Is the rise of the digital domain - and what the title of the first white paper calls "The Emergence of Digital Civil Society" - somewhat responsible for this challenge? I think so, but not just because of the network itself. The Stanford authors recognize this:

"…within the nonprofit sector, powerful forces have pushed nonprofits in different directions. First, nonprofits are under pressure to act like efficiency-obsessed, outcome-oriented, mission-driven businesses, a dynamic that has created in the process an entirely new industry—management consulting for nonprofits. And second, the blurry line between the social welfare and forthright political activity of nonprofit organizations has grown virtually indistinct, raising important questions about the tax code, the appropriate agents and realm of regulation, and the very meaning of social welfare."

That blurry line is fascinating, and for good reason. It includes "leaderless" organizations like Occupy and fundamentally oppositional forces like Wikileaks and Anonymous, as well as the seemingly unending supply of ad hoc "instant" campaigns (what I called "flash causes in my now five-year-old book CauseWired). Ideas and empowered people with an ocean of data at their fingertips are everywhere - but is that the flash and noise that obscures the massive changes down in the trenches of social services, education, healthcare, and culture?

"One goal of the Philanthropy, Policy and Technology Project," write the authors, "is to distinguish between those innovations or new tools that are superficial and those that matter enough to warrant a reconsideration of the rules and regulations that guide philanthropy. Our times are full of change—new methods of communication, tremendous economic uncertainty, demographic and political shifts, and innovations in finance, technology, and science. But which of these areas of change, if any, are meaningful enough to warrant regulatory revision?"

This is the right question to ask, and I deeply admire that last line about regulation - it's where the democratic tires hit the pockmarked roadbed of the digital highway. I suspect that new innovative models are on the Stanford minds - changes that will challenge government to open up and ease regulation to allow them to flower. But just as certainly there may also be a need to build more regulation to protect and service digital citizens, especially those without access to capital markets. Case in point: mobile telecommunications and the social networks they support - "This regulatory patchwork exists even as Internet access is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few Internet companies and a few telecommunications and cable access firms and Internet usage for search and social networking is equally heavily concentrated." How we organize ourselves when we're carrying super-connected devices rich with the world's data should certainly influence how our elected representatives regulate commerce and martial public resources.

Less clear to me is the importance of the new "sharing" economy. I certainly get shared digital data - that's here to stay and it changes how we all interact with information. (At least 100 of your will share this post, if past patterns hold, for example). But the idea of shared workspaces, shared homes, shared vehicles is "new" only in certain - and let me gently point out, economically entitled - circles. Shared cars and bikes and the mobile digital technology that lets us access those resources may not, in the end, have a vast impact on the social commons. After all, we've had shared transport for well over a century now, even if we no longer use metal tokens to access it.

Data, however, is another story. Huge amounts of public data - whether released by cities, gathered by the IRS in regulating charity, or dumped by WikiLeaks - do necessarily create impact on their own, or empower democracy to a fuller extent. "It is not enough to put public data sets online at data.gov or on municipal websites and expect people to find and use the information," write the Stanford authors. “'Build it and they will come' has not been an effective model in open data." Yet this quandary goes to the very core of the idea of a shifting - and potentially more potent - "digital civil society." And that core to me will always revolve around the basic challenges of democracy, especially in the republican flavor here in the U.S. Will this new civil society be more democratic - not just reflecting the will of the people, but actively supporting and empowering it on a daily basis? And will foundations, those empowered giving centers that represent a small percentage of the money but a huge piece of the influence, learn to share data better within philanthropy?

There are many new flavors and models at work in "old" civil society, but the stresses on the social sector seem to grow - with the gap between the richest and poorest in our society being the most obvious symptom. I'm fascinated by the questions in the first Stanford white paper and look forward to reading (and thinking about) the rest. There may be more in this space to come. I agree with this open-ended conclusion: "We have few conclusive results from these experiments other than the need to acknowledge that there are many more points of intersection than previously recognized."